


morning

by orta



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 07:57:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10849752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orta/pseuds/orta
Summary: “Good morning, A2.”There was never a reason for the pod to say this to her. (endgame spoilers)





	morning

The sun hardly moves in the sky, not that she pays much attention to it.  She’s a rogue soldier, not an astronomer or anything.

The point is, it hardly rises or sets.  Sometimes it rains, sometimes it gets cloudy.  One memorable day, she remembers it stormed so badly that thunderheads had almost blocked the sun out entirely and cast the world into deep shadow.  She wondered, back then, if this was anything close to what it would be like at night.

She also wondered if she’d survive being struck by lightning, but that was just morbid fascination at work more than anything.

Androids don’t sleep.  Of course, they did need to power down at intervals to run diagnostics, preferably connected to a terminal at the Bunker or at a safe location like camp.

She doesn't have either.  She's a lone survivor on the run.  She couldn’t expect help from anyone.  If a machine struck her down, no one would save her.  If one of her functions failed and she didn’t know how to repair it, she’d have to either deal with it or die.  Nobody was going to look out for her except herself.  She couldn’t rely on anyone.

It’s when her systems are pushed to her limits and she starts to see little error messages blurring together in the corners of her vision that she’d hunt down the safest crawl she could find—a hole in the wall, a cradle of branches in tree canopy, abandoned churches and office buildings—and finally let herself boot down.  If a machine finds her prone body while she’s in sleep mode and crushes her head in, there would be nothing she could do about it.

She can go days and weeks and maybe even a month without rest, if she really pushes herself, but she can’t even lie—every time she closes her eyes to power down, she has some doubt whether she’d wake up again.  In some ways, it’d be a relief if she didn’t.

  
  


Androids don’t dream.  As far as she knows, it’s not as if she’s an expert on that matter either.  Dreams are a human thing.  They may look surface level alike, but what separated androids from humans otherwise?  Several billion lines of code and mechanisms and fiber-optic parts, you wouldn't even have to cut deep—

She must run through her memories in sleep-mode, constantly, obsessively.  Even without running the algorithm to do so, even when she actively tries not to think about it.  Maybe her data is corrupt.  She can’t even verify the authenticity of her own memories.  Sometimes, she can only access recalled audio—the voices of her teammates, number 4 and 21 and 16, her comrades, Rose and Lily and Anemone.  Sometimes she recalls visuals.  The sight of earth, delicate and blue as they descended planetside in flight suits.  The elevator doors, closing in on number 21’s face.  Number 4’s desperate smile, seconds before her final attack.  Sometimes she could feel and relive the touch of her hands.

She finds it harder and harder to trust her own memories of those days.  She doesn’t even have a good reason why.  Accessing those memories, painful ones, happy ones... sometimes when she’s running low on energy and can barely even lift her sword, she has this overwhelming, irrational doubt that those days had even happened.  Maybe she had always meant to be here on earth, slaughtering machines nonstop, chronically alone.  If all she had were memories of the dead, she could hardly confirm that they’d ever existed.  Maybe it would be kinder if they didn’t, if they'd never lived so they’d never have to have died so miserably.  Maybe all of those visions and voices of her friends, if she’d ever had any, were nothing but a bad dream.

But androids don’t dream.

And if they were dreams, she wonders why she’d torture herself with the same ones, over and over again.

  
  


“Good morning, A2.”

The voice is unknown to her.  That, almost more than anything, snaps her out of standby like an electric shock.

The pod floats before her.  The pod of that B-model girl she’d executed.  It's surely a newer model Yorha add-on, she certainly hadn’t had a firing extension when she’d been dispatched to Earth for that Pearl Harbor mission years ago.

She knows that pod belongs to that B-model and she knows that pod’s owner is dead by her hand.  So what is it doing here?  If it wanted revenge, it could have fired a bullet into her head while she’d been powered down.

The pod floats in closer and she wonders idly if she should slice it apart before it fries her with a laser.

But the memories of that B-model girl... she hesitates.  She must have been assimilating them through the sword during standby.  Not everything—it’s a lot of data, even if 2B hadn’t been active for as long as A2 had.  It might take a few more sessions for her to fully process the data, if she even wants to.  But she’s absorbed enough that even looking at the pod brings up unprompted feelings of fondness, camaraderie.  The pod is her ally—

No, it was 2B’s ally.  She can’t trust it yet.

She slowly gets to her feet, like she always does after rousing herself from sleep mode.  Always slightly surprised to still be alive.

  
  


It’s difficult to adjust to the pod.  She can tolerate having it tag along and hover at her shoulder to provide support, but sometimes she forgets it’s even there and it startles her to see a smaller shadow floating over hers.  There have been a few times she’d drawn her weapon and nearly cut it in half, when she’d been on edge and still running high on adrenaline after a battle with machines and she’d mistaken the gunmetal gray of the pod behind her as an enemy that had escaped her blade.  She’d come close to slicing it into pieces and stop herself, sword just a single stroke away from a lethal strike.  And the pod would just continue to float there, peacefully, as if it had no idea how close it had come to narrowly avoiding death.

If pods can even die like androids can, anyway.  She’s not entirely sure how in-depth its AI runs.  2B didn’t know, either, she knows that much from a cursory search through the sword’s memory data.  Well, it’s not as if 2B would ever have had a reason to distrust her pod.  

Speaking of, it’s kind of annoying how often she gets the strange impulse to pet her pod’s anterior surface... she’s pretty certain that’s another memory from 2B and her sword.  She might have fucked up, accepting that girl’s death and her data.  But she wouldn’t have turned it down.

It’s been a week since that pod woke her up after she executed 2B.  She’s tired.  She wants to rest and run diagnostics, but—

“Analysis: unit A2’s energy reserves are nearing critical levels.  Proposal: rest, combined with maintenance and data checking.”

“I’m  _ fine _ .”

“Unit A2 is in functional status.  However, performance would be optimized after a period of rest.”

“I don’t rest unless I really have to,” she mutters.  What she doesn’t say is—oh, and she still doesn’t exactly trust it not to put a bullet in her head once she lets down her guard.  It’s not about being paranoid.  It’s about how she’s always operated to stay alive.

“Unit A2 will not perform at her optimal level using such an irregular maintenance pattern.  Regular rest intervals are recommended.”

“What are you, my mom?”

“Negative.  Pod 042 is a tactical Yorha support—”

She groans.  “You really need to learn what a rhetorical question is.” She’s an android, it goes without saying that she doesn’t have such a human fantasy as family.  And if she did, there’d be no damn way she’d ever consider this annoying pod as anything close.

The pod floats on down closer to her shoulder.  “Hypothesis: unit A2 is concerned about being vulnerable to attack while in sleep mode.  Proposal: Pod 042 will stay in operation while unit A2 is performing maintenance and protect her.”

She stares at the small machine.  “You’re going to what?”

“Proposal: Pod 042 will stay in operation while—”

“Rhetorical.  Question.  Damn it.” She lets out a breath, runs a hand through her short hair.  She’s still not entirely used to this new length, but she doesn’t dislike it.  “I heard you the first time.”

“Query: in that case, what is the purpose of requesting clarification?”

“No, it’s just...” it said it would protect her.  It’s been so long since she’d had someone at her side to fight with, to protect and trust to watch her back.  She’s been alone for so long, the concept of having someone—or something, in this case—look out for her is...

_ It’s reassuring _ , comes a thought she’s sure can’t be hers.  It might be 2B’s remnant data, from her sword.

“It’s a pain in the ass,” she mutters under her breath.

“Proposal: unit A2 should rest to relieve stress on her posteri—”

“No, that’s not what I mean.  Not literally.  Obviously!”

“Clarification requested.”

“ _ Denied _ .”

  
  


She’s always been alone.  Ever since Pearl Harbor.

But now she has the pod, if it counts as a companion at all.  And it’s a pain in the neck and keeps spouting all these bullshit analyses and proposals.  But it was also offering to protect her.

Maybe that counts for something, just barely.

  
  


“Good morning, A2.”

She wakes up in the desert.  Her head hurts.  There’s sand in her throat, she can practically taste it in her deep filters.  She blinks, and she thinks she could still see 2B’s shadow flickering like a mirage.

Damn it.

The pod floats calmly above her.  The desert is a wide-open, hostile expanse, unimaginably large.  She’s probably explored a scant fraction of it.  It’s like a minefield.  She could go for days or weeks without seeing a single living creature, or she could stumble upon a cluster of goliath-class bastards or gangs of bizarrely-dressed stubbies wielding muskets and wearing stupid hats... she’s seen it before, all right?

The point is, she’s either lucky that a machine hadn’t stumbled across her unconscious body, or...

The pod takes position over her shoulder.  She has to admit, she’s never used firing support like it before.  It feels— _ reliable _ , the sword data offers, but she ignores it.  It feels strange.  But it’s not unhelpful.  She has no idea if the pod was watching her or protecting her while she’d been knocked out, but she’s not about to ask.

Anyway, she now has a fuel filter to replace, thanks to that damn pod’s nagging.  If it were up to her, she’d ignore the problem until she was choking on it and coughing up sand.  So all things considered, maybe it’s a good thing the pod is pestering her.  She’d never tell it that, obviously.

She picks herself up and sets off across the desert.

“Pod.”

“What is it, A2?”

She’d never tell it that, but—

She thinks of the vision she’d received, just before she’d collapsed.  The sword, 2B’s sword, is a heavy weight on her back, heavier than the telekinetic antigravity that anchored it there.

“Do you miss her?”

She’s not going to specify who ‘her’ was.  If the pod had a fraction of artificial intelligence in that insufferable shell, it would know.

The pod doesn’t respond for a few seconds.  Longer than it’d normally take to parse questions, which is instantaneous when it’s responding to her sniping.

“Pod 042 lacks the capability to ‘miss’ anyone, even if the subject was its previous owner.”

She crests a dune and shields her eyes against the sun.  There’s no movement from any enemy machines that might be roving nearby.  Maybe those goliaths she’d taken down had laid claim to this territory and smaller machines wouldn’t even bother wandering nearby.  Maybe the pod hadn’t even needed to defend her, if she hadn’t really been in danger of being attacked in the first place.

2B’s pod was incapable of missing 2B, or so it says.

She’s not sure if that’s sad, or a mercy.

  
  


_ Good morning, A2 _ .

She wakes up.

Androids don’t dream, but she thinks her memories might just be trying to eat her alive instead.  She dreams of her friends, the teammates she’d loved and lost.  She dreams of 2B, unreal as a mirage.  She dreams of the Tower.  Summiting it, finding 9S at the top.  Trying to hack into him to save him.  Taking his sword to her chest when she hesitates to strike him.

She dreams and remembers dying and knows this time the dream and memories were real.

And she’s alive.

It’s morning.  Or rather, it’s never morning and never evening and never night, in this world where the sun never sets.  There was never a reason for the pod to say good morning to her.  It’s not as if the pod ever observed a true morning or evening or night, either.  It must have picked up the phrase from accessing old world data and kept repeating it to her to... to... she has no idea what its reasoning is.

And the pod is nowhere in sight and she has no idea where the hell it might be.  Or why she’s still alive.  She’s inclined to believe that pain in the ass pod is behind this somehow, and now it’s rude enough to go missing so she can’t even interrogate it over this.

She stirs, stares out at the beauty of the world, a picture beyond the frame of the window she’s sitting on.  Oh, she’s alive.  And if she’d leaned just slightly in the wrong direction after waking up, she might have fallen and smashed her head into concrete and changed that.  Another thing to chew that stupid pod out for, if— _ when _ she finds him again.

A dove cocks its head at her when she gets to her feet and runs a hand through her hair.  Ah, her hair is longer again.  And her sword, 2B’s sword is gone.  Without the weapon, she only has memories of 2B’s memories.  

2B had told her to take care of the future.  What a vague request for a girl to make of a deserter, but 2B had been delirious from fighting the logic virus and desperately trying to pull herself together so she could at least die as herself.  2B’s pod and her sword are gone.  But she still has 2B’s last request.  That’s one memory she wouldn’t lose.

2B told her to take care of the future.  She wonders if she’d even remotely succeeded.

She rises to her feet and looks out to the sun.

It’s a good morning.


End file.
